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Can hreflang tags still work when the Alternate URL is 301 redirecting to a translated URL in Japanese Characters?
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My organization has several international sites 4 of them of which have translated URLs in either Japanese, Traditional Chinese, German & Canadian French.
The hreflang tags we have set up on our United States look something like this:
But when you actually go to http://www.domain.co.jp/it-security/ you are 301 redirected to the translated URL version:
www.domain.co.jp/it-セキュリティ/
My question is, will Google still understand that the translated URL is the Alternate URL, or will this present errors?The hreflang tags are automated for each of our pages and would technically be hard to populate the hreflang with the translated URL version. However we could potentially make the hreflang something customized on a page level basis.
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Hi there,
You should add in the hreflang annotation the final URL showing the content, not one that is just 301 redirecting to another. Are you seeing errors in the Google Search Console "International Targeting" report? If you see "no return tags" errors there for Japan, then means Google is not being able to identify them.
Thanks!
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Redirects should be avoided. If the Japanese translation of your page is located at www.domain.co.jp/it-セキュリティ/ then please don't use www.domain.co.jp/it-security/ in your hreflang tag.
If it's hard to specify the correct URL in your page HTML, try providing Hreflang info in sitemaps instead.
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